In Towns Along the Road to Tripoli, Anxieties Compete With Exuberance

As the tide turns in the battle for Libya, it could take months before life regains a sense of normalcy in a country that has been subjected to one of the world’s most mercurial brands of rule.

ANTHONY SHADID

TRIPOLI, Libya — The road to Tripoli begins at Dehiba, a backwater Tunisian town made prominent by the revolution across its border. “Free Libya,” the flags read, hoisted on cars passing customs in a gesture driven by pride as much as fear.

No one knows what lies ahead in Tripoli, or Libya, for that matter.

“To be honest with you, I’m over the moon,” said Jamal Tantush, returning to the Libyan capital after 30 years away, as he lined up with his nephew. “But to me, it’s not over yet. Until they catch him really, it’s not completely over.” He glanced at a Libyan passport that once shamed him. “Till we know for sure the snake’s head has been taken out.”

The fate of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was but one of the anxieties that alternated with ebullience on the eight-hour drive to Tripoli, winding through the Nafusah Mountains, toward the plain along the Mediterranean Sea, and across the coast to the capital.

There was novelty, as travelers glanced at ragtag rebels who still look, as they did six months ago, like a militarized version of Tahrir Square, where youth in Egypt overthrew another dictator in a paroxysm of theater and protest. There was unease at scenes reminiscent of Iraq in April 2003, the moment of another upheaval; as in Baghdad then, cars were lined up for gas in a country with one of the world’s largest reserves of oil.

And there was a sense of the ephemeral, like the last hours of a long party.

“I expect something new,” said Mazigh Buzakhar, a 29-year-old activist from the mountain town of Yafran, after his passport was stamped. He smiled. “Something new.”

The road was littered with the detritus of the fall of a dictator that was long in the making but never felt imminent until the coastal town of Zawiyah fell a week ago. Tanks incinerated by NATO airstrikes testified to already forgotten skirmishes. An abandoned armored truck drew the curious and the awe-struck. A mosque was burned, its white walls scorched by flames. So were carcasses of vehicles, an ambulance among them.

Checkpoints and barricades looked like their equivalents in all the other uprisings that have swept the Arab world this year, in Hama in Syria, Sitra in Bahrain, and Cairo. There was utility in everything — chairs, bricks, traffic pylons and scrap metal. At one, an orange trash can read simply, “The house of the brother leader,” Colonel Qaddafi’s preferred title.

Town after town declared its freedom: Yafran, Nalut and so on.

“Let Qaddafi leave us, and let us go on,” said Fathi Omar, a father of seven who was returning to Nallout after four months away. “That would be his gift to us. After 40 years, that’s all we ask from him.”

Mr. Omar predicted 8 months, maybe 10, before life returned to normal, as far as normal goes in a country that has been subjected to one of the world’s most mercurial brands of rule.

The task before Libya’s rebel leadership is admittedly huge, building a state in a country where one man embodied authority. There is no army, as there was in Egypt and Tunisia. There is foreign intervention, but no occupying power. The title of the Qaddafi state still adorns some buildings: the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab State of the Masses.

The road offered a window on the challenges that will almost certainly proliferate. One traveler demanded that Tamazight, the tongue of the Berber minority, be made an official language. Another spoke of women’s rights. Others offered a litany of the demands heard so often these days in the Arab revolts: a constitution, pluralism, civil society, individual rights, and some way, somehow, to prevent the return of dictatorship.

A message broadcast on a Libyan radio station pleaded against revenge killings of those loyal to Colonel Qaddafi, who have yet to surrender in Sabha, Surt and parts of Tripoli.

“They are Libyan like you,” the message said.

From Zintan on, the streets of towns and cities had the look and feel of Baghdad at its most anarchic. Salam Salah, a 15-year-old, carted a brand-new assault rifle, fixed with a bayonet. The scars of fighting mingled with the graffiti of the battle. “We are coming for you,” one slogan read. The new offices of authority felt makeshift and hasty.

“It’s still a mess,” said Col. Jumaa Ibrahim, rushing from room to room in one of those places, which still bore a map of the Arab world Colonel Qaddafi thought he should lead. “I can’t say anything about the future. I’m so busy, I can’t even think about tomorrow.”

The parallels with Iraq went only so far, though.

The fall of Saddam Hussein never had the narrative of a revolution, with all the slogans attributed to Omar Mukhtar, the Libyan resistance leader hanged in 1931. It had little of the jubilation captured in the smiles of children and the elderly, as they passed trucks ferrying opposition fighters flashing V-for-victory signs. Nor did Iraq have the sense of solidarity seen here that offers perhaps the greatest hope for an Arab world saddled with the smaller identities of sect, ethnicity, clan and history.

“The Street of the Martyrs of Benghazi,” read a wall in Zintan, 600 miles away.

“I’m taking care of my town,” declared Khalifa Hadi al-Rouni, 61.

He stood in a circle of traffic, blowing his whistle relentlessly, as he motioned for cars to pass, some of them still smeared with mud for camouflage.

His perch was a soapbox of sorts, and he seized the moment to deliver a poem.

“We are Misurata!” he shouted, his voice booming. For a moment, it was audible over the horns. “We are the strength of Zintan! Get out of them, you coward!”

The road beyond barreled through squat settlements of cinderblock, their shoddiness as damning an indictment as any of a state that squandered its resources. It passed bulldozers trying to remove battle-tested barriers of sand, and volunteers cleaning streets of accumulating bags of trash. A few shoveled garbage with pieces of cardboard.

The graffiti was still fresh in the capital. In the citadel of his power, Colonel Qaddafi had become the tyrant, the Guy with the Crazy Hair and, in a play on his own words, the biggest rat. One of his attempts at propaganda remained standing. “Forty-one years of permanent joy,” the sign read. Someone had crossed out the number, scrawling an alternative in red.